Spam Kings

by McWilliams, Brian S

  "Shoot me for trying," she wrote.

  Fearing Shiksaa was dangerously close to resigning from the corps of spam fighters, Murphy posted a public plea asking the group to back off in its criticism: "I'm very impressed by Susan's ability to get people on the phone ... She doesn't deserve the heat she got, and I know that she felt it."

  Shiksaa had little time to brood over the debate surrounding her peacekeeping mission. Two days later the operators of the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) added CyberCreek to their powerful and controversial spam blacklist. Run by Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS), a nonprofit consortium founded in 1997, the RBL included the network addresses of major spam operations as well as companies that provided them services. By configuring their mail servers—and in extreme cases, their network routers—to reject any traffic to or from addresses on the RBL, ISPs effectively were able to isolate spammers from communicating with parts of the Internet.

  When he found out his company had been placed on the RBL, Brunner snapped. Jettisoning the conciliatory tone he had taken with Shiksaa, Brunner went into full verbal-combat mode. He configured his newsreader to add a new signature line at the bottom of all of his Usenet postings, "DEATH TO ALL NET-NAZIS!!!" His new sig also included the name, address, and home phone number of MAPS cofounder Paul Vixie, a California-based consultant and network engineer, as well as contact details for a handful of other leading anti-spammers. On September 9, 1999, Brunner posted a message to Nanae, calling Vixie a "fascist piece of anti-American, anti-business dirt" and warning that "When I am done with you, you won't be able to wipe the dingle berries off Bill Gates' ass."

  Brunner's display of vitriol wasn't aimed at Shiksaa, but it bothered her deeply. There she was, putting Andy forward to her Nanae brethren as a businessman who could be reasoned with. Instead, he revealed himself to be a cretin, justifying the warnings of those who had called her naïve. It cultivated in Shiksaa a strong desire to retaliate.

  After contemplating some options, she launched Microsoft FrontPage Express, the HTML editor that came with her computer. In a couple of hours, she had whipped together a web page entitled "The Brunners of Chickenbone Creek."

  Using some photos she found online, Shiksaa assembled a simple collage on a bright red background. Beneath the photo of a Winnebago trailer she placed the caption "Home," while she captioned a photo of an AirStream trailer with the words "Summer home." Below an image of a young girl holding a bucket of fried chicken, Shiksaa added "The Future Mrs. Spamdrew Brunner." She also found a photo of a can of Hormel SPAM in which the product's name had been changed to SCAM. She gave it a caption that read "Staple of the Brunner household...err...trailerhold."

  To complete the page, Shiksaa added background music in the form of a midi file, which played a computer-generated version of the dueling banjos piece from the movie Deliverance whenever someone viewed the page. Then she uploaded the files to her Earthlink personal site and published a link to the page on Nanae.

  The spam fighters were delighted with Shiksaa's little creation. Several quickly posted glowing reviews. "A classic...truly inspired...You have earned a special place (TINSP) in the hall of NANAE-ites with that little gem," wrote one.

  After checking out Shiksaa's Brunner parody page, a Nanae participant named Rick navigated to her new personal home page, where she had published a small photo of herself.

  "Would it be ok if I had a mild crush on you?" he wrote.

  Before Shiksaa could respond, a user from England named Ian chimed in, "Get off. She's mine!"

  Brunner, on the other hand, was not amused in the slightest. He posted an ominous, if grammatically puzzling, public challenge to Shiksaa.

  "Why don't you make it easy on me and give me your real address. When I find you I won't let go until you are either penniless. At the very least you won't be able to have a charge card. Enjoy the rest of your pathetic life," wrote Brunner.

  Shiksaa knew it was just another one of Brunner's bluffs. He was a beaten, ineffectual man. Unless he drastically changed his business practices, CyberCreek.com would remain hopelessly black-holed from the rest of the Internet. At that point, there was really no reason to kick Brunner while he was down. But Shiksaa simply couldn't resist.

  "I meant to tell you," she wrote in reply to Brunner's threatening note on Nanae. "You have a little whiny voice and you sound like you can't be older than 20. Has your voice finished changing yet? Get rid of that annoying adolescent acne?" Shiksaa signed the note, "Smooch, smooch, precious."

  Rereading her message when it appeared on Nanae, Shiksaa realized it sounded catty and mean-spirited. But it wasn't really meant just for Brunner. She also intended it as a deterrent to spammers everywhere. Don't mess with The Lady of LART.

  Hawke's Publishing Company in a Box

  At the time, Davis Hawke didn't know the term LART, but he knew firsthand its potentially awesome power. Within days of Karl Gray filing complaints about receiving eight Web Manual spams, InnovaNet had shut down Hawke's dial-up account, and Interspeed had pulled the plug on hosting the WebManual2000.com domain—all before Hawke had a chance to make more than a handful of sales. He paced the floor between his office in the trailer and the kitchen. He was ready to move ahead with his life. He had shaved off his push-broom moustache. He'd taken the swastika flags off the walls and the Nazi death's head off his dresser. He'd tossed the remnants of a box of American Nationalist Party business cards into the garbage. He was keen to print up a fresh set bearing the name of his new online enterprise: Venture Alpha Corporation. It frustrated Hawke to know that people were still determined to get in the way of his plans.

  Hawke was having a hard time clinging to the belief that greatness was his historical destiny. It had been drilled into him as a boy, when his mother would quiz him at mealtimes on the Ambler family tree—her side of the family. Who did great, great, great Grandmother Polly from Virginia marry? Why, U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall, of course! And who signed their marriage certificate? Then-Governor Thomas Jefferson! And who turned down a marriage proposal from soon-to-be-President Jefferson? Great, great, great, great grandmother Rebecca!

  During these dinner-table genealogy lessons, Hawke's father just smiled and listened. They never devoted much conversation to the Greenbaum side of the family. So when Britt's fourth-grade teacher assigned students the project of drawing up a family tree, the young boy focused exclusively on the Ambler clan. When it was Britt's turn to present his project to the class, he unfurled his drawing, which he had labored over for hours with his mother, and began talking about his family's patrician roots.

  The teacher took one look at the neatly drawn chart and ordered him back to his seat. "Shame on you, Britt Greenbaum," she scolded, certain he had fabricated it all.

  Looking back now on his aborted show-and-tell, Hawke realized that one of the greatest skills chess had taught him was not to allow small setbacks to thwart his grand strategy. Although his mother was furious to learn of the teacher's reaction to his genealogy report, Hawke let the incident slide by. But eight years later, he quietly made the trip down to the Dedham courthouse to change his name. And neither parent opposed the move.

  Hawke thumbed through the Greenville/Spartanburg Yellow Pages. He was looking for the section on Internet services. After a few phone calls, he arranged for a new dial-up account with a company in Anderson called Carolina Online. He signed onto Carol.net and began piecing together his next Venture Alpha offering.

  This time, he would market something called Million Dollar Publishing Company in a Box. He had got the idea a few weeks back from a piece of junk email that arrived in his Yahoo! in-box. The message, apparently sent by a company in western Massachusetts, advertised a CD-ROM with advice on how to start a home-based business selling "information through the mail." For ninety-nine dollars, the author was willing to part with full reprint rights to hundreds of reports on topics ranging from how to win a sweepstakes contest to how to become a TV or movie star.

  Hawke re
cognized the offer for the scam it was. Like the Web Manual, the only people likely to buy the Publishing Company in a Box were other spammers. It wasn't quite a pyramid scheme, but it relied on some of the same twisted logic. Hawke chuckled at one especially clever part of the ad:

  I am sending this ad to 10,000 other people...and I will only allow 50 kits to be sold. It wouldn't make much sense if I sold this kit to 1,000 or 2,000 people...The market would be saturated with these same manuals...and I don't want to do that. To make sure that the people in this offer get the same results I have...ONLY 50 people can have it for $99.00!

  The author even promised to return, uncashed, any checks he received after selling his quota of fifty kits. Hawke realized he would be ecstatic if he made $5,000 from his hundred-dollar investment. Then again, if hundreds of orders rolled in, who would know besides him? Hawke purchased the CD-ROM, determined this time to make some serious money before spam haters got in his way.

  When the CD arrived in the mail, Hawke took it to a computer store in Spartanburg that charged five dollars per CD to burn two dozen copies for him. Since Interspeed had shut down his WebManual2000.com site for violating its terms of service, Hawke had to come up with a temporary work-around until he could find a new host for the domain. He uploaded a copy of the old site's files, slightly modified for his new venture, from his PC to a home page he had created at Angelfire.com.

  A free, ad-supported home page provider catering to consumers, Boston-based Angelfire had two big drawbacks. It didn't allow members to advertise their home pages using spam or to run programs for processing online orders. To fill the latter gap, Hawke signed up at CartManager.net for a fourteen-day demonstration. The Utah-based electronic shopping cart service would enable him to seamlessly submit orders from his Angelfire site to his account at CartManager.

  After creating a new email account for the project, netwealth_99@yahoo.com, Hawke worked on his ad copy. He used the original message almost verbatim, with necessary changes to the ordering information. Hawke also modified a section at the bottom of the ad that instructed recipients on how they could opt out of future mailings. In hopes of mollifying spam haters, Hawke whipped up this version instead:

  We are STRICTLY OPPOSED to spam! You are receiving this email because you have either signed up for one of our services or you have authorized your email address to be given out by filling out an "opt-in" form when signing up for any type of free service. If you wish to be removed from this email list, please send a message to "attainwealth@yahoo.com" with the word "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the subject field. We apologize if you have received this email in error.

  As a further countermeasure against complaint-related interruptions, Hawke decided to switch mailing programs. He'd received a spam advertising a package called Extractor Pro, which, according to its web site, was designed to send ads onto the Internet through third-party mail servers known as open relays. These machines, usually operated by businesses, universities, and other organizations, had been configured (either out of courtesy or neglect) to allow unauthorized users to bounce their messages off the servers en route to their final destinations. As a result, recipients of the messages who examined the headers could trace their origin back to the open relays but usually not to the sender's ISP. Hawke purchased and downloaded a copy of Extractor Pro from the company's web site.

  On October 20, 1999, Hawke was ready to broadcast his new ad for Publishing Company in a Box. He signed on to Carol.net and configured Extractor Pro to use the half-million fresh email addresses that came with the program.

  Meanwhile, nearly five hundred miles away in Washington, D.C., Heather Wilson, a republican from New Mexico, was introducing the Unsolicited Electronic Mail Act of 1999 to the U.S. House of Representatives. If enacted into law, the bill would require email marketers to use real return addresses on their messages, provide opt-out features, and abstain from forging their messages' headers. A failure to comply could open them up to private lawsuits from individuals or ISPs to the tune of five hundred dollars per infringing message.

  But Hawke wasn't paying attention to national news, much less to pending federal legislation. After double-checking to make sure Extractor Pro had successfully connected to a set of relay servers, he took a deep breath and pushed the program's start button. Tomorrow, the 21st, he would turn twenty-one—his golden birthday. Who knew what it might bring?

  Chapter 3.

  Shiksaa Meets the Cyanide Idiot

  Jason Vale was in big trouble. For nearly two hours he'd been trapped in a windowless conference room in the U.S. Attorney's office in Brooklyn. A government lawyer was grilling Vale, 29, about his Internet-based apricot seed business, which he operated from his home in Queens, New York. It was April 2000, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had been after Vale's company, Christian Brothers Contracting Corporation, since 1997, when they sent inspectors to his home.

  It was just a deposition, but Vale felt like he was already on trial. He really needed to use the bathroom, but his interrogator—a woman in her mid-twenties—wouldn't let up.

  "How would you characterize your feeling, your religious beliefs in relation to the work that you do?" asked Allison Harnisch, a trial lawyer with the Department of Justice's Office of Consumer Litigation.[1]

  Vale wasn't certain where she was going with the question, but he lurched into his standard answer about how Genesis 1:29 contained a prescription for life without cancer:

  Then God said, "I now give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the entire earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food."

  There are way too many lawyers in this room, Vale thought. Besides Assistant U.S. Attorney Harnisch, there was Vale's lawyer, another attorney from the Department of Justice, and one from the FDA. Vale was just an online entrepreneur, filling orders in his basement for bags of apricot seeds; tablets of the extract from the seeds called Laetrile, or vitamin B17; as well as an injected form of the compound. He used several computers to send out email advertisements for his web sites, which included apricotsfromgod.com and canceranswer.com. In its 1998 suit against him, AOL claimed that Vale sent an estimated 23.5 million junk emails to AOL members.

  Vale didn't have much respect for AOL or the FDA. On his sites' home pages he explained how the pharmaceutical industry pushed the FDA to ban B17, even though many people believed the compound worked as a cancer preventative. (B17 couldn't be patented, so, as Vale saw it, drug companies considered it a threat to their profit model.) Sure enough, the FDA had sent him several warning letters stating that Laetrile was not approved as a drug and that he was violating the law by promoting it as a cancer cure. Now it looked like their goal was to get a court order forcing him to stop selling the B17.

  "Do you want to stay in business, this business?" Harnisch asked him.

  Vale stiffened. "Is that a threat?"

  "It's just a question," she said.

  "I would love to stay supplying seeds," he replied.

  Who wouldn't? Before Vale launched the company, he was working construction and running a billiard parlor. Now, he was grossing easily $300,000 a year from his low-overhead spam business, shipping out nearly a ton of apricot pits and over 100 boxes of tablets a month.

  Harnisch asked what Vale would do if the court said he could no longer sell apricot seeds or B17.

  "I would listen to the court if the court said that I can't sell B17," he replied. But then he added, "If it said I can't sell seeds, that's a different story."

  "Why would the seeds be a different story?"

  Vale explained how the state of Arizona allowed the sale of apricot seeds as a nutritional supplement and how companies all over the place were selling them. He told her about how he called the FDA once and even it said he could do it.

  "Mr. Vale," his lawyer butted in. "Just answer her questions. Just keep it to answering her questions."

  "Can I go to the bathroom?" Vale asked.

  Out in the hallway, Vale
let out a deep breath and headed for the men's room. He'd told customers that he was in a David-versus-Goliath battle, but he'd actually faced much bigger opponents than the U.S. government. The summer after his high school graduation, Vale developed a persistent cough and a pain deep in his left side. When the symptoms didn't respond to antibiotics, doctors finally figured out there was a tumor the size of a grapefruit between his spine and his ribs. Surgeons removed the growth, diagnosed as an Askin's tumor, and left a nearly two-foot-long curved scar below his left shoulder blade. They said most people with the rare form of cancer lived only about eight months. But when Vale came home from the hospital, he did a handstand in the driveway—the staples in his back be damned—just to show everyone he was fine.

  That was eleven years ago, and Vale didn't look like a cancer victim now. He was a strapping 180 pounds and had gone on to become a world-champion arm wrestler in the middleweight class. He survived a second bout with Askin's and another surgery. He attributed his success in beating the disease to eating a dozen or more bitter apricot pits every day (in addition to praying even more than usual).

  When Vale returned to the conference room, Harnisch said she wanted to talk about his spam email operation.

  "My forte," he smiled.

  "To your knowledge, do you have a reputation in the Internet community?"

  She was leafing through several pages of web page printouts. They were Nanae postings, he assumed correctly.

  "I see myself in the newsgroups," he said.

  "Would you say you're notorious for your spams?"

  Vale's lawyer jumped in, saying he objected to the question. But he instructed Vale to answer.